salted chocolate cake with fresh berries

7.04.2017

Despite wanting to keep things simple, it's hard for me to stop adding things to a dinner menu - even if it's just a simple bbq. I saw this cake show up in my Instagram feed probably about a month back and knew it would be a great addition to our party. In fact pretty much everything on this girl's blog is incredible looking.

This cake has pretty much the exact right number of steps. It is shockingly simple but has some really great flavor. If there is a complicated part, it is melting the chocolate - but that isn't even too hard. I needed to hack together a double boiler since I was out of glass mixing bowls. I ended up using a glass pie plate over my dutch oven ... and it worked. Honestly? It worked better than any other time I've melted chocolate. This might become my default double boiler situation.

A few notes:

this recipe calls for "good butter"... and I just went with what I had in my freezer... which was absolutely not "good butter". If you make this cake, splurge. Get the good butter. It's a main ingredient here.

Count your eggs before you start baking. I had absolutely overlooked that it required 6 eggs... and managed to have exactly that number. This means that I'm not making the raspberry ricotta cake for breakfast. Another day.

Berries. The recipe calls for raspberries and I do think that those are really the best here. I did mix in some strawberries to help lower the cost - but you want something juicy... and blackberries and blueberries don't really give off that vibe.

I absolutely overcooked this cake. I was pretty nervous about it coming out too fudgy (insane I know). I think I ended up cooking it for like 45 minutes? At 35 it was absolutely not done, but I should have pulled it at 40.

Here's how it goes.

Preheat the oven to 325°F and either line or grease your chosen baking pan.

Melt the butter and chocolate together via a double broiler method. Set aside to cool for 5-10 minutes while you get on with the next step.

Place the eggs and sugar into the bowl of a stand mixer and whisk on high speed until the mixture is light and fluffy, and has doubled in volume. Trust me, you'll know when they are fluffy.

Add the chocolate mixture and mix to combine.

Gently fold through the flour.

Pour the batter into the cake tin and bake for 30-35 minutes, or until a skewer inserted into the middle of the cake comes out mostly clean. It is a fairly moist cake, so the skewer will not come out totally clean. But if there is wet batter on the skewer, bake the cake for another 5 minutes or so.